Quotations

excerpted from the book

The Splendid Blond Beast

by Christopher Simpson

Common Courage Press, 1995

p27
...The concept of a crime against humanity was not well defined at this point, even by its advocates. But the definition had at least two important elements that set it apart from earlier understandings of war crimes, which were limited to acts that a government might take against the population or troops of a foreign power.

First, crimes against humanity included atrocities that were criminal not only under civil law but also under the most elementary morality, yet were not technically war crimes. The new definition included domestic campaigns to exterminate a particular ethnic or religious group as well as institutionalized slavery, even though neither of these was considered a war crime under the Hague of Geneva covenants.

Second, many atrocities committed by a government against its own people were defined as crimes against humanity.

p32

French Premier Georges Clemenceau

"Oil is as necessary as blood.''

p33

U.S. High Commissioner to Turkey was Admiral Mark L. Bristol

"The Armenians, are a race like the Jews-they have little or no national spirit and poor moral character."

p34

Allen Dulles, chief of the State Department's Near East desk

"[T]he Secretary of State wants to avoid giving the impression that while the United States is willing to intervene actively to protect its commercial interests, it is not willing to move on behalf of the Christian minorities." Dulles went on to complain about the agitation in the U.S. on behalf of Armenians, Greeks, and Palestinian Jews. "I've been kept busy trying to ward off congressional resolutions of sympathy for these groups.''

p35

Marjorie Housepian Dobkin's study about the shift in western media content and government behavior toward the Armenians during the Harding Administration

"Those who underestimate the power of commerce in the history of the Middle East cannot have studied the postwar situation in Turkey between 1918 and 1923," Dobkin writes. "There were, of course, other political factors that proved disastrous for the Armenians . . . but the systematic effort (chiefly by the Harding administration) to turn U.S. public opinion towards Turkey was purely and simply motivated by the desire to beat the [rival Associated] Powers to what were thought of as the vast, untapped resources of that country, and chiefly the oil."

p51

Dillon, Read Chairman Clarance Dillon

"Throughout history, societies have been dominated by one element of society or another-by priests, by royalty, by the military, by politicians either from the common folk or from the aristocracy, and from time to time by wealthy financiers. This last element had found its way to the top of the hierarchy for a while in ancient Greece, in Rome in the days of Lucullus, in the city-states of Italy during the days of the Medici, for a while in France, and . . . in the United States."

p68
Most members of the German economic elite were not Nazi ideologues or fanatical anti-Semites, at least not as individuals. They were, however, willing to sacrifice the lives of innocent people in order to achieve or maintain a privileged position in German society.

p76
Adolph Hitler, prior to his invasion of Poland in 1939

"Our strength is in our quickness and our brutality. Genghis Khan had millions of women and children killed by his own will and with a gay heart. History sees only in him a great state builder.... Thus for the time being I have sent to the East . . . my Death's Head Units with the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of the Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?"

p77
A (secret)1942 report on the fate of Jews in eastern Poland

"... The following system was applied everywhere: men, fourteen to sixty years old, were driven to a single place- a square or a cemetery, where they were slaughtered, or shot by machine-guns, or killed by hand grenades. They had to dig their own graves. Children in orphanages, inmates in old-age homes, sick in hospitals were shot, women were killed on the streets...

p78

SS security chief Reinhard Heydrich at 1942 Lake Wannsee meeting

"Europe will be cleaned up from the West to the East," Heydrich commented. "Able-bodied Jews will be taken in large labor columns to these districts [i.e.: Nazi-occupied territories on the Eastern Front] for work on roads . . . in the course of which action a great part will undoubtedly be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, as it must undoubtedly consist of the toughest, have to be treated accordingly, as it would, if liberated, act as a bud cell of a Jewish reconstruction." All
German government agencies were to cooperate with the SS in this plan; it was to be the "final solution of the Jewish problem in Europe."

p81

The evidence shows that, despite later denials, much of the corporate elite of Germany was well aware of the Nazis' extermination programs. Thousands of German corporate directors and senior managers knowingly contributed to murders carried out by their institutions, in many cases even after they had become disenchanted with Hitler and knew that the war was lost. The SS and the Nazi party could at least point to their ideology as an explanation of sorts for their participation in crime. But the business elite could not make even that claim. For them, cooperation in years of genocide became simply a matter of doing business.

p84

IG Farben appears to have been the first company to fully integrate concentration camp labor into modern industrial production, and it eventually became known in Germany as a model enterprise for this new technique. Farben executives even provided advice and training on the large-scale use of forced labor for executives from Volkswagen, Messerschmitt, Heinkel, and other major companies.

p87

... German industry's unprecedented exploitation of slave labor became a crucial element of the Holocaust. But it is often overlooked in the popular imagination and in media portrayals of Nazi crimes, which tend to stress the role of the political police or the grotesque and horrifying extermination camps

p88

... The foreign workers became what amounted to chattel slaves. Most were Poles, Ukrainians, French, and Russians, though virtually every European nationality was represented. The Nazi government effectively owned these workers and leased them out to private industry for war production or agricultural labor.

... In contrast, Jewish concentration camp inmates and many Soviet POWs were set to work in order to extract some labor from them during the process of destroying them.

... The prisoners worked to death were primarily Jews, though they were in time joined by groups of Polish and Russian POWs homosexuals, "guest workers" who had attempted to escape from corporate work gangs, and others.

p134

Herbert Pell, 1920s about the American business community after WW I

" The destinies of the world were handed them on a plate in 1920. Their piglike rush for immediate profits knocked over the whole feast in nine years. These are the people, with an ignorance equaled only by their impudence, who set themselves up as leaders of the country.

p271

The legal precedent that resulted from the U.S. trials of German industrialists after WW II

... a nineteen-year-old draftee accused of war crimes cannot successfully plead that he was acting under orders, but the owners and directors of multi-billion-dollar companies can.

p271

... the U.S. high commissioner for Germany John McCloy [who followed General Telford Taylor] granted clemency to every single industrialist who had been convicted at Nuremberg.

p272

U.S. policy ... entailed an amnesty for much of what German business had done during the Holocaust.

p287

It is individual human beings who make the day-to-day decisions that create genocide, reward mass murder, and ease the escape of the guilty. But social systems usually protect these individuals from responsibility for "authorized" acts, in part by providing rationalizations that present systemic brutality as a necessary evil.

p287

... the real issue ... is the character of social systems that permit decisions institutionalizing murder to take on the appearance of wisdom, reason, or even justice among the men and women who lead society.

Splendid Blond Beast

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